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Thursday, November 18, 2010

Ann from a girl in paradise submitted this darling quilt made of her son's clothes. I so need to do one of these! Ann has some cute projects going on on her site, so make sure to visit her blog. Thanks Ann...

Like most moms I have a bin of my favorite outfits my son wore when he was a baby. A bin that I couldn’t seem to part with. So, I turned them into a quilt. A quilt to pass down to him. A quilt made up of the outfit he came home from the hospital in. the outfit he wore to his first birthday party, and the outfits he received as gifts when he was born. All of them memories. Memories of time when mother bonds with her son. The cute little footed sleepers he wore on those countless sleepless nights or those shirts stained with strained peas and carrots.

I didn’t have a clear pattern or direction for this quilt when I started working on last summer. I first separated out my favorite outfits that had a top and a bottom, then I set them into off centered blocks. I really like how these turned out. It gave me the freedom not to be limited to a certain size square when cutting out the shirts. This was important because the outfits ranged in size from 0-3 months to 2T. Next I cut 6” squares to set in between the rows of off centered blocks. At this point I started to lay things out to decide how the quilt was to be arranged. I decided to sash the rows with navy blue and give it a border, but I still had a lot of fabric and outfits that were not yet used in the quilt. That is when I decided it also need a border of the scraps. When the top was done I took the larger scraps and his receiving blankets and pieced the back. I also included a block with an inscription for my son.

This quilt was definitely a labor of love. I so enjoyed working on this quilt that when it was finished it made me a little sad…another chapter ending, and another chapter beginning. Next, I will have to start a bin of things he wore playing sports, school sprit shirts, or maybe even cub scouts. Whatever the future holds for my son on his journey through life.